Online marketing
From www.entrepreneurstoolkit.org
The survival of your e-commerce venture heavily depends on the amount of traffic you are able to attract to your site. Many new e-commerce sites find themselves in a catch-22 situtation: without customers, you can't afford advertising - but without advertising, you can't attract customers.
Here are several ways to get your marketing efforts off the ground at low cost. [1]
- Mention your site in online forums
- Offer a free service
- Write a blog, or related articles
- Include your URL on everything
- Join a Web Ring - a series of related sites that link to one another, promoting traffic flow between them. It costs nothing to join, and having other sites link to you will increase your search engine ranking. Find a Web Ring resource at Webring.com
- Hold a contest
- List your site on Froogle - Google's free comparison shopping search engine.
- Distribute a free press release
- Start a viral marketing message - something that users find so interesting or entertaining that they send it out to other users - it spreads by itself, like a virus.
Search Engines
Getting your site listed near the top in a search engine is arguably the best possible Internet marketing. However, 100 zillion other Web sites just like yours want top listing, too. These days, getting highly ranked requires both time (several months, at least) and money.
- register your site with the top search engines - that alone won't get you listed but they'll know to crawl your site
- Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of tweaking your site so that search engine spiders will more readily recognize it, and hence boost your site's ranking. Many e-businesses hire SEO experts, who are high-priced gurus that help them change their site to boost their ranking on search results.
- If you can't afford a SEO guru there are some basic steps you can take to optimize your site for search engines.
- make sure your page titles, meta tags, and site text are all focused on attracting the shoppers you want
- To get the most click-throughs from search engines, make your site's title specific and interesting
- Description meta tag - a one to two-sentence description of the site (no more than about 250 characters), incorporating all the keywords you know shoppers are searching for
- Keywords meta tag - list of terms (about 170 characters or so) including all the most common terms that shoppers use to search for your product. These terms should be the same ones used in your description meta tag.
- Headings - headlines must, again, incorporate your site's key search terms
- Ensure your search terms are built into the text in your site
- Ensure all hyperlinks use the search terms you want to be found for
For more information about SEO, visit Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Forums.
Even if all your tags are in order, to get highly ranked you'll need many sites to link to your site. Search engines place great weight on this. You can contact related sites and suggest reciprocal links, but that is a tough process. It will only work if you can offer something of value, at the very least, a link from a truly relevant site (yours), which boosts their search ranking.
One way to build a network of links to your site is through affiliate marketing. With an affiliate marketing program, you sign-up other Web sites to link to yours, and pay them a commission if a click-through results in a sale.
The advantage to affiliate marketing is that you pay only when you make a sale. Consequently, many well-established e-commerce sites use affiliate marketing. They hire firms like LinkShare and Commision Junction to help them administer their programs.
Paid Search
- To ensure your site comes up when a user searches for a given term, you bid for that term on a per-click basis. The more popular the term, the more expensive it is. Many terms are pennies per click (though many are far more expensive), and the search engines allow you to set a spending cap so you don't spend the family fortune.
